[OSM-talk] Most complete cities and administrative divisions database

[Sami Dalouche]

Hi,

Does anyone know how OSM compares to other open source databases when it 
comes to cities and administrative divisions ?
For instance, the geonames project (http://www.geonames.org/) provides 
over 7 million POI, and 2 million of them are cities.
So, more specifically, here are my questions :
1/ how many cities are present in OSM ?
2/ how many of these cities are also associated to polygons that delimit 
them ?
3/ Are countries and administrative divisions also explicited in OSM ? 
(e.g. USA, California, Orange county, ..)
4/ Are there polygons for these administrative divisions and countries ?

The reason I ask these questions is because I am currently working on an 
open source library for doing full text lookups of
cities, countries and other administrative divisions. 
(https://github.com/samokk/gisgraphy-java-client).
The project started as a client for http://www.gisgraphy.com (which is
based on geonames for the cities/countries/adm part), but I am wondering 
whether it is pragmatic enough to completly ditch
gisgraphy/geonames in favor of OSM (the geonames Intellectual property 
is not 100% clean - as indicated on 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources#Geonames.org_.28Rejected.29 
-,
and the geonames project is not being run as openly as OSM).

thanks,
Sami Dalouche